


A Grand Memory for Forgetting

by Masu_Trout



Category: Dangan Ronpa
Genre: Amnesia, Awkward Conversations, Dangan Ronpa Spoilers, F/F, Falling in (something resembling) love at the end of the world, Heart-to-Heart, IF AU, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Apocalyptic Blanket Forts, Post-Canon, Pre-Slash, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She'd meant to make a grand entrance. She wanted to stride in, confident and self-assured, and demand <i>answers</i> from the least trustworthy of their supposed allies. </i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The world is a wreck. The students of Hope's Peak are kind of a wreck too. Kirigiri and Mukuro can only fix themselves, but even that might be a start.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Grand Memory for Forgetting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dreamsonfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamsonfire/gifts).



If nothing else, Ikusaba Mukuro was good at disappearing. 

Kirigiri finally found her tucked away in a corner of their so-called secret base, crouched inside a tent made from two office chairs, a three-legged desk, and something she thought might be the remnants of a bed sheet.

She'd meant to make a grand entrance; she wanted to stride in, confident and self-assured, and demand _answers_ from the least trustworthy of their supposed allies. (And for her to hold that title, in a group that contained both Togami Byakuya and Celestia Ludenberg, said an awful lot.) But when she swept aside the rag that passed for a door, she was met with a pocket knife not two inches from her face.

_Of course,_ the analytical part of Kyouko's mind supplied, even as the rest of her was focused on getting away from the dangerous weapon without making too much of a fool of herself, _She has a soldiers instincts._

Even now, with the wig laying in some oily puddle and the makeup long ago washed off, some part of Kyouko still looked at Ikusaba and saw the fashion model, the innocent, the girl who was just as much a victim as the rest of them. It was a dangerous sympathy, one she should have let go of long ago. 

She didn't know what it said about her that she couldn't.

Ikusaba at least had the decency to look embarrassed once she realized who she was pointing the knife at. She flicked it shut with a snap of her wrist, and it disappeared back within one of her coat's many pockets faster than Kyouko's eyes could track.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Ikusaba was the first to break eye contact. She dropped her gaze to the floor and sighed softly. Kyouko decided that was about as good an invitation as she would ever get, and took a seat amid the plaster dust littering the room.

“So,” she said, “Is that how you normally greet your allies?”

Almost immediately, she wanted to take the words back. She'd come here to have—well, not a _friendly_ conversation, perhaps, but at least a civil one. And here she was antagonizing this woman in her very first line.

(It wasn't that she hated Ikusaba. Many of the people in their group did, but Kyouko wasn't among them; this hellish world had left her with far too many enemies for that. She had no bitterness left to spare for an ally, regardless of the things she'd done before. It was just that... well, she was angry. At herself and at the world, and especially at anyone who got close enough to make a suitable target.)

Surprisingly, though, Ikusaba didn't take the bait. Instead she just frowned, so softly that Kyouko could hardly be sure she'd seen it at all.

“I apologize,” she said shortly. “I didn't recognize your footsteps.”

Kyouko arched one eyebrow. “Oh? I would have expected you to have those patterns memorized, considering.”

_Considering you apparently have two years of memories involving me,_ she didn't have to say.

There was another long pause. “You walk differently,” Ikusaba finally replied. “The person I remember had a longer stride.”

“Ah. So it's my fault, then, if I get knifed in the face by my own ally.”

Ikusaba didn't respond to that. She just glanced at Kyouko, the expression in her eyes something she couldn't identify, then quickly dropped her gaze back to the floor.

“What?” Kyouko snapped. She could already tell she was going to regret everything about this conversation, from her words to her tone, but she was a brimming with red-hot frustration that she could hardly bear to keep inside. This emotion was trouble—it meant she was losing control of the conversation and of herself—but being able to recognize it meant absolutely nothing when she had no idea how idea how to make herself stop feeling it.

“...You're not going to like it,” Ikusaba said. Her eyes were still firmly fixed on the ground.

“Humor me.”

“I was just thinking—” Ikusaba's voice was hardly more than a whisper— “That I'd forgotten how vicious you used to be.” 

Not for the first time, Kyouko was struck by the difference between this Ikusaba and the Ikusaba they saw on the battlefield. (She grabbed that thought, held onto it, because it was the only thing distracting her from saying something she would _really_ regret.) Put anything resembling a weapon in her hands and give her a target to go after, and she might as well have been a machine—she certainly had the precision, grace, and complete lack of emotion of one. Here, though, tucked away in the furthest corner of her decrepit little hidey-hole, Ikusaba was barely able to hold up her end of a conversation. 

Kyouko forced her breathing to slow, and clenched her fists until she could feel the crescent-shaped bursts of pain where her nails were digging in. This Ikusaba was not someone she could afford to snap at and insult, not if she wanted answers to her questions. 

“Well,” she said finally. “I've _forgotten_ a lot of things too, apparently. So I suppose it's only fair.”

It wasn't quite the suave comeback she'd intended. But she hadn't said anything she would truly regret, so it counted as a victory.

To her surprise, Ikusaba actually laughed a little at the remark; it was a quiet, desperate little sound, but it was laughter nonetheless. “Yes, I guess that's fair.” 

It petered off almost as soon as it had begun, though, when Ikusaba suddenly glanced up and caught Kyouko's eyes. 

“Why are you here, Kirigiri-san?” she asked. She sounded tired, though their group had woken only three hours before. 

“Shouldn't I be the one asking you that question?” Kyouko responded. “It's not going to help your reputation any if you spend all your free time hiding away from the rest of us.”

Ikusaba quickly broke eye contact—a clear sign that she wanted to avoid answering the question. “They're not going to start liking me anytime soon no matter what. Not under these circumstances.”

“Naegi-kun likes you.”

“Mak- ah, Naegi-kun likes _everyone_. Even if you hardly know him now, you should at least be able to see that. And anyway,” she continued haltingly, “Naegi-kun remembers. How... how we used to be. All of us. I'm a part of the reason those ties were broken in the first place; I can't just ask everyone to start over with me.”

“I think you can,” Kyouko said. Ikusaba looked like she wanted to say something, but Kyouko pressed ahead. “That's why I came here. I want—I want to _know_ what I'm missing. I have these gaps in my memory that I can't even make sense of, and it's driving me crazy. I want you to tell me what those two years were like.”

Ikusaba was silent for a long moment, her expression unreadable. “You're not asking Naegi-kun?” she asked.

“I don't want to bother him.” Somehow, whether it was due to his returning memories or just the sheer force of his unassumingly charismatic personality, Naegi had ended up the leader of their ragtag little group. He was a far better job than anyone could have expected from a fifteen-year-old boy, but it meant that he slept like the dead—an all-too-fitting metaphor these days—whenever he got a few moments to himself. She would feel too guilty if she woke him for this, and she had a feeling she would lose her courage if she didn't ask this now.

Sometimes, it was easier not to know. But according to Naegi, she was Hope Peak's Super High School Level Detective. It was her job to uncover the truth.

“...Fine.” Ikusaba sighed. “What is it you want to know?”

“ _Everything_.”

\--- 

Ikusaba's explanations were slow and halting. Kyouko coaxed them out of her one at a time, clarifying and digging deeper with every hint of information she got.

Why had she come to Hope's Peak? What was her relationship with the rest of these people? How had no one been able to stop the end of the world? Who _was_ she?

The fragmented pieces of her memory began to knit themselves together as Ikusaba talked. There was no grand moment where she suddenly remembered everything, but it was intensely satisfying every time she managed to fit a piece of what Ikusaba told her into the gaps in her own knowledge.

She was a Kirigiri, a born detective. She'd been training for it all her life. Her father was the headmaster of Hope's Peak, and he was the reason she'd come there in the first place. 

She was so busy puzzling over those three facts—they felt old, like a piece of herself, and yet she couldn't ever remember knowing them before today—that she almost missed the significance in Ikusaba's next words.

“Wait,” she said. “What was that about my hands?” She shouldn't—she shouldn't _know_ anything about that.

“Oh, right.” Ikusaba's gaze dropped down to Kyouko's gloves. “You didn't wear those much during our second year. It was only the sixteen of us, after all.”

Sixteen people. If Ikusaba wasn't lying to her, that meant she had walked around without her gloves on in front of sixteen people. Kyouko fought next to them on a near-daily basis, but in every other way they still felt like total strangers. She couldn't even imagine such a thing.

It was completely bizarre. There was whole other person she'd apparently once become, and it was someone who she couldn't even begin to understand. Did Naegi look at her and wish she were that other girl instead? Did Ikusaba?

“I don't understand.” It wasn't something she ever liked to admit. “You're saying all these things that make it sound like we were close. So then why would you do this to us?”

“I was afraid.” Ikusaba said. There was no hesitation, no lowered eyes. Just cold, steely determination. This was the Ikusaba who came forward when you put a gun in her hand.

“Of Enoshima-san?”

“Always,” Ikusaba admitted. “She wanted me to be terrified of her. It was how she showed she loved me.”

Kyouko frowned. She could understand bad family relationships—these new memories of her father, incomplete as they were, gave her more than enough first-hand experience. But the way those two seemed to care about each other, hatred and love intertwined, was far too freakish.

“But,” she continued, “That wasn't why all of why I agreed. I thought...” she trailed off, biting her lip, like she couldn't figure out how to shape the words she wanted to say. “In the beginning, none of us were supposed to die. She just wanted to see the rest of the world burn, and it only made it more exciting if she had to trap us all together to make that work. I went along with it because I thought it would be easier.”

“Easier than what?” 

“Easier than watching everyone leave.”

It was that comment that made the last of the pieces slide into place. A teenage soldier with no one in her life but her sister, whose sole close relationship revolved around suffering. Give her a chance to make... well, not normal friends, not by any stretch of the imagination, but friends who were more or less functional human beings. Put them all in close proximity, so they had no choice but to grow close.

Then, just when she was starting to become comfortable in her new life, remind her that there was a time limit. In four years, everyone would be leaving; they would be going to other schools, opposite ends of the country, maybe even other countries entirely. And tell her that at the end of it she'd be all alone again, with nothing and no one but a girl who wanted to watch her suffer.

What would Kyouko have done, if she'd been in that position?

Part of her wanted to leave now. It would be easier to walk away, forget they'd ever had this conversation, and go back to treating Ikusaba like a rather untrustworthy stranger. 

But she was a Kirigiri, and it was because of Ikusaba that she remembered what that meant.

Before she could second-guess herself, she crawled forward. “Is there any more room in that fort?”

Ikusaba looked confused for a moment, but she moved aside as much as she could once she realized what Kyouko wanted. The space was tight for just one person, and impossibly cramped for two; Kyouko quickly gave up any hope of keeping her dignity while crushed so tightly against Ikusaba. It was rather comforting, though. Between the wall at their back, the tangled wood on either side of them, and the curtain that blocked them from view, it was easy to pretend that nothing bad would ever be able to find them in here.

It should have been tremendously awkward. No matter how much Ikusaba knew about her, the girl was still a virtual stranger to Kyouko. But somehow—whether it was the circumstances they were in or just Ikusaba's odd personality, Kyouko didn't know—it somehow felt comfortable instead.

“When I was little,” Ikusaba said after a moment's pause, “Junko and I would make forts like this together.”

“Ah.” Kyouko didn't know quite how to respond to that. The silence stretched on between them, long enough to be uncomfortable. 

“Can I ask you one more thing?”

Ikusaba nodded. This close, Kyouko felt the motion more than she saw it.

“What was your favorite memory of Hope's Peak?”

She thought it would take some time for Ikusaba to answer, but she responded almost immediately. “It was a few months into our first year. Celestia managed to get ahold of the master key to the school somehow, and we decided to have a picnic on the roof of one of the buildings. It was sunny out, and the weather was fantastic—” 

“And Yamada-kun brought instant ramen, but of course there wasn't a microwave on the roof.”

Ikusaba nodded. A moment later, started and turned towards Kyouko, mouth open and eyes wide.

“Wait. You.. you remember?” Her voice was somewhere between hopeful and afraid.

It wasn't a clear picture, just incomplete images and sounds that faded in and out. 

_A younger-faced Naegi, his familiar hoodie tied around his waist. Fujisaki's laugh, still soft but sounding more confident than she'd ever heard it. Celestia, a teacup held in one hand. And Ikusaba—wearing not a wig and makeup or ragged urban camouflage, but the Hope's Peak Academy uniform—watching them all with a soft sort of affection in her eyes._

“Not quite,” Kyouko said. “Not yet.” She smiled with confidence she was slowly beginning to feel. “But give me some time and I'm sure it'll come back to me.”

The girl Ikusaba had described to her still felt more like a stranger than a possible version of herself. But, given the chance, she was a stranger Kyouko would be happy to meet.

“Of course,” Ikusaba said. And perhaps it was just a trick of the dim light, but Kyouko thought she saw her smile back.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide!
> 
> This didn't come out quite as obviously femslashy as I'd hoped- with these two, getting them to a place where they'd even be in a position to start a relationship is tough. So I very much hope that awkward cuddling is something you enjoy!


End file.
